Look what Ive made.

Stories about innovation

Written by Jacky Bahbout for Holmes & Marchant.

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In defence of corners
People say the camel is a horse designed by committee. Well I dont agree. If the camel had been the handiwork of a committee I guarantee it would look roughly like every other generic looking four-legged animal out there. The kind that in a childs drawing needs a collar or a saddle or some other distinguishing accessory. Dogs, horses, dingoes, deer all roughly the same shape if were honest. Ok, you might get slightly longer legs here and there perhaps a slightly pointier ear. Whatever. These are variants. Theyre line extensions. Theyre not hit-you-between-the-eyes innovation. A camel, on the other hand, blows the competition out of the water. Its unlike anything youve ever seen before. Its created a whole new category of its own. Thats because a camels corners have been left alone. The corners are the bits that stick out the outrageous, controversial bits. The wonderfully awkward bits that keep an idea lodged in your mind the bits that make it different. The corners are also the bits that will get knocked off by a committee. Theyll get whittled and worn away until everyone can agree. And youre left with a lowest common denominator of an idea: something generic that offends no one but excites no one either. If the first ever giraffe had been tested in research, I bet it would have bombed. Theyd have said, its nice, but the necks a bit long. Look at sheep they do really well and theyve got little necks. Theyd have wanted to play it safe. I think thats because when you ask people to judge something, their judgements always based on what they already know. And for innovation thats not only pointless, its dangerous too. So go ahead, ask people what they think. But dont let them knock the corners off your camel.

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The passionate innovator

Andrew Doyle, Chairman There might be no I in team, but there is an I in innovation. In fact there are two, and Im not sure what that means for handy spelling clichs, but the point is this: I believe that behind the best innovations stands a passionate individual. The guy who can imagine a world where his idea exists, and will walk over broken glass until it does. Pushing against this guy is a conservative attitude you often find in business, that says this works fine as it is dont rock the boat. But its the guy who rocks the boat who has the next big thing scribbled in the pages of his notebook incomprehensible perhaps, to anyone else, unremarkable at first But somewhere between the page of scribbles and this guys gut, persists a private conviction that his idea in one shape or another is good enough to succeed. And knowing his idea might take one shape or another is what sets our passionate innovator apart from the stubborn egomaniac. Yes, he believes in his idea, but he knows it takes trial and error and an openness to criticism to turn his great idea into a successful innovation. Our passionate innovator will open his idea up to feedback early on and test it to destruction. That doesnt mean giving up when someone doesnt get it. On the contrary, its the people who dont get it who can show him exactly how to make it better. James Dyson famously made 5127 prototypes before he perfected his revolutionary bagless vacuum cleaner. Thats 5127 prototypes, not 5127 designs in a private notebook. 5127 reallife crap vacuum cleaners, held up for all to see, and criticise and improve. And this is where I think a lot of people go wrong. They think having passion for an idea means clinging to it, mollycoddling it, afraid itll get thrown out by people who dont understand. But I say throw out your idea, tear it up and then make it better. If consumers in the dreaded research group dont get it, then improve it until they do. Really good innovation needs passionate individuals who are arent afraid to ask others what they think.

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What more could we possibly need?

I work with brands every day. Most of my waking hours are spent getting to the bottom of them, thinking about design and what makes people choose one product over the next. And yet every time Im standing in the laundry isle of my local supermarket, weekend shopping almost done, staring at a shelf full of detergents I am defeated. At first, my mind goes to projects Im working on, appeals to the copy on the labels after all, I know what all this means. Then I search my memory for a scrap of insider knowledge about surfactants I once gleaned from a client workshop. And when all my mental faculties, my professional know-how, my powers of common sense are exhausted I resort to sniffing. My brain goes on strike and asks my nose to step in. And suddenly all the decisions about bio or non-bio, concentrate, tabs, price, colour, and number of washes melt away and Im left with a beautifully simple question: which one smells nicest. And as I wheel my trolley to the check out and watch item after item beep past the scanner I wonder, is there really room for any more? With all the products crowding our shelves and our lives, is there anything left to invent? The answer, of course, is yes. Yes, theres clutter, but thats not the clutter of brilliant innovation. That clutter is all the copycats, vying for a piece of proven success. Above all the noise and the me-toos is a quieter, less populated world of truly new ideas. Thats where real innovation happens, and its where there will always be room for more. As the world changes from one year to the next, so do our values and our needs. And as they do, there will always be a handful of curious people who respond to those changes by making things. Theyre the ones who get there first the ones who stick their necks out the ones who lead the way. Human beings are born curious. And as long as we stay curious, there will be infinite great ideas waiting to be had.

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Look what Ive made.

One day when I was seven, I came home from school driven by an invisible force. Our teacher had shown us you could swing a bucket around in the air without the water falling out. She was trying to teach us the basics of centrifugal forces. But I understood it as a demonstration of how to make washing machines. And I could think of nothing else. As soon as I got home, I set about constructing my human washing machine. It involved a giant cardboard box with a large hole cut out the front, and me standing inside swinging a bucket of water around my head. Not only did my washing machine not wash clothes; it was also completely redundant. My mum had a very good regular washing machine. There was no demand for my human model. And yet something made me do it. A powerful force got me up at six a.m. to work away at my machine, never for a moment doubting what I was doing, or questioning what it was for. Im sure it was something to do with the high I got from saying, Look what Ive made. Its a high familiar to most kids. (It was about the same time that my friend Jennie was designing flip-flops for mice). Childhood is a tiny window when our ideas dont need a reason for being theyre allowed to just be. For me, anyway, school and common sense soon stepped in. As I grow up, I learnt to analyse, and to make reasonable decisions. I learnt to judge what makes a good idea. In fact, I got so good at judging ideas, I forgot how to come up with them in the first place. But some people are lucky. They still come home and say, Look what Ive made! Theyre still propelled by the unreasonable force of pure creativity. Youll find these people in funny places. Games companies, R&D departments every good creative agency has a few. Theyre not the most commercial of people, but theyll help you find the best ideas. Of course, you cant base an innovation on someone saying, Look what Ive made! Your consumers will never be as excited as your R&D department is about their new biphasic liquid unless it meets a genuine need. But pure creativity can be a good place to start. After all, its easier to turn madness into a solid idea than it is to start with something solid and make it magical. There are plenty of clever people wholl help you rein in a mad idea. Its the ones wholl think of it in the first place that are hard to find theyre a much rarer breed. So if you do see any, invite them into your innovation workshop let them help you make something.

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Quiet innovation
Somerset Maugham once said, All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary its just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences. I believe the same is true for innovation. All the elements of your new idea already exist. They just need rearranging. People often think creativity is about conjuring. But I think its a much simpler, quieter activity. It requires nothing more than curiosity, following your nose, and noticing. Then trusting that the bits and pieces you store deep in the shoebox of your subconscious will float to the surface exactly when you need them. -One day when I was 25, I treated my dad to a posh lunch. It being the seventies, and I being keen to show off, I chose Langans in Mayfair. I remember many things about that lunch but Im slightly ashamed to admit that for all the laughs we had, the thing that really stands out is the size of the desserts. In fact, it wasnt so much the size of them, as the height. Profiteroles balanced precariously like a tall, chocolate covered snowman; a teetering millefeuille whose layers must have counted well into the thousands. Even the trifle was knocked into an elegant, tower-like shape. They werent any bigger than desserts Id seen before; they were simply taller. And somehow the tallness made them special. And the special, tall desserts made me feel very proud. Twenty years later, I was sitting at a very different table, staring at 12 varieties of meat pies. It was an innovation workshop for Marks & Spencer. Im not sure what the exact trigger was, but someone started talking about specialness and generosity and suddenly I was back at Langans, sitting across the table (and two very tall desserts) from my dad. Later that year, M&S launched their new gourmet pies. While they were no bigger than regular pies, they were taller and finally looked as special as the luxurious ingredients inside.

What Im trying to say, is that yes, a lot happens in that room during the innovation workshop but not as much as you think. The hard work has really been done quietly, without you knowing it, in the years, months, minutes before you step through the door. So next time you sit down to nice coffee and biscuits, flipcharts waiting to be filled relax and remember youre not about to invent anything new. Youre just going to witness some magical connections between the odds and ends in your mind.

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The art of stealing

Picasso said, Good artists copy, great artists steal. In innovation, nothing good comes from copying. You get nowhere you end up with something old. Stealing, on the other hand, means taking something and making it your own. And I think the easiest way to make sure you steal your ideas and dont copy them, is to look in the right place to start with. Copycats look at successful competitors for inspiration. Innovators look everywhere else. I have three favourite places to steal from. The first, perhaps most obvious place, is other categories. Like a weird breeding exercise what do you get when you cross this product with that? It works because you cant ask your brain to dream up something completely new, with no reference to anything it knows. Try and think of a new colour or a new sound But as soon as you say its like orange, but cooler, or its like a siren, but mellow then you can begin to imagine. Its like are powerful words. Like crisps, but chocolate. Like tea, but soup. Like a pen, but concealer. These products become not just easy to imagine, but easy to explain too. Consumers can say, Yeah, I get it which is the first step to them trying them. Another place I love looking for inspiration is consumers. Look at what theyre already doing the wonderful ways theyre misusing products. Its a great place to start because it always points to a genuine need. I love the way crisp packets get ripped apart for sharing, microwaves become cupboards, bicycles shopping trolleys, and long sleeves gloves. But my favourite place of all for stealing inspiration is nature. Not only has it inspired some of historys greatest innovations, it holds an infinite supply of amazing ideas. Burdock seeds sticking to the fur on a dogs coat was Velcro waiting to be discovered! Theyve made swimsuits like sharkskin, bullet trains like kingfishers And it excites me beyond belief to know that as I write, Zimbabweans in a skyscraper in Harare are being cooled by a natural air-con system stolen from a termite mound somewhere in the Kalahari Desert.

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Sliced bread: a hard act to follow

Some great innovations arrive on the scene quietly. Others announce confidently theyre going to change our lives forever. When bakers in a small town in Missouri started selling sliced bread, the local paper knew they were on to something big. Its Friday 6th July 1928, and the town of Chillicothe has woken up to a partly cloudy local thunderstorms not so warm day. On the front page of the Constitution-Tribute is a story about a rescued Swedish airman and the announcement of a three colour signal light set to regulate traffic across the United States. In the middle of the page, a proud headline stands out: Sliced bread is made here. Thanks to a groundbreaking new machine, the Chillicothe Baking Company will be, from the following morning, the first bakers in the world to sell sliced bread to the public. The idea of sliced bread may be startling to some people, reports the article. As one considers this new service one cannot help but be won over to a realization of the fact that here indeed is a type of service which is sound, sensible and in every way a progressive refinement in Bakers bread service. Women, it seems, will benefit the most. The fact that the slices of this improved product are so perfect will be especially pleasing to women who take pride in the technique of their table service. The slices stack so perfectly, they are ideal for the making of neat, dainty sandwiches. For toasting purposes they are unexcelled. Does this sound the death knell of the bread knife? asks the paper. After all, the exciting new machine seems hard to compete with. There is no crumbing and no crushing of the loaf and the result is such that the housewife can well experience a thrill of pleasure when she first sees a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows. So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand with a bread knife that one realizes instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome. Today, with over 80 years hindsight, the bakers of Chillicothe seem a bit cocky to have presumed theyd done in the hardy bread knife. But waking up that morning, theyd have surely been pleased to know that their brainchild would become in popular English the benchmark against which all future innovations would be measured.

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A caveat

John Mathers, Managing Director Innovation. Making up new products. Its fun, its messy, and success requires letting some silliness in. As creative people, we love it. But were not in the business of pure innovation of simply creating products. Were in the business of building brands. And for us, building a brand means telling a story. Thats why we see innovation not as an end in itself, but as an opportunity for brands to tell their stories. Why stories? Because stories engage us, they seduce us, they inspire. From the beginning of time, in every part of the world, people have been telling them. Stories arent about a company talking to a consumer. Theyre told by one human being to another. Good stories dont tell us what to think; they make us feel. And when we feel, we listen. Good brands do the same. Thats why we dont just put a new product out there. We invest it with meaning. We use design, language, environments to all work together and tell a very specific, coherent narrative. Because the more vivid the picture you paint, the more people feel, and the longer they listen.

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